


Finding Water

by astolat



Series: Fast & Furious works [12]
Category: Fast and the Furious Series
Genre: Accidental Heroism, M/M, Post-Apocalyptic Western, Trope Bingo Round 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 15:59:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4631346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t like it,” Vince said. </p><p>“Why would you like it?” Dom said. “There’s nothing to like about it. But if there’s a better way for us to get water, I’m waiting to hear about it.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Water

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to Cesperanza, Mollyamory, and hafital for beta!

The floorboards of the cart were wet and cool all over, little pockets of water in the corners, nothing more than damp left in the entire cask. The crack at the bottom was about as long as his palm, and just big enough that Dom could see a little light through it. It had to have been leaking away the whole goddamn day, but Jesse looked so miserable that Dom didn’t have the heart to yell like he wanted to. “It’ll be all right,” he said instead, quietly.

Letty snorted, shaking her head. Jesse darted a look at her and back. “But we don’t have enough water left, Dom,” he said anxiously.

“Let me worry about that,” he said. He raised his voice. “We’ll stop here for the night. Get the horses fed and put up the tents, everybody.” He gave Charger’s reins to Jesse. The kid just stood looking up at him, still crumpled; Dom took his shoulder, turned him around and gave him a gentle push back towards the rest of the group. “Go on, get him settled for me.”

Jesse trudged away, head hanging. “It’s _not_ going to be all right,” Letty said. “We’re not going to make it across the Dry on one cask of water, not unless we kill half the horses.”

“What do you want me to say to the kid?” Dom rubbed a hand over his head. “I’ll think of something.” Letty just gave him a look and a wide sweep of her arm over the rocks and the scrub all around them, running flat and level in every direction. “I’ll _think_ of something,” he said sharper.

Letty shook her head again and walked her mare Blitz over to the others, the other horses whickering a little to welcome her in. Dom watched them nose at each other as they gathered around the feed tub: their little herd, finally starting to deserve the name, and in another year or two they would’ve had enough of them for a stakehold— His jaw tightened. No. In another year or two they were _going_ to have enough. Nothing else was even an option.

Problem was, all the options they _did_ have were bad. Everybody was quiet while they ate; they all knew. Dom felt them glancing at him, hoping, wanting to ask what he was going to do; he ignored them and ate every last bite of the mush Mia handed him, tasteless as sawdust in his mouth even though he’d been riding hungry for the last two hours. He put the bowl down after and stood up. “Letty, you’ve got the camp,” he said. “While we’ve got daylight left, see what the rest of you can do to get that cask fixed up, and check the waterproofing on the other one while you’re at it. Until we’re refilled, we’re going to a three-quarter ration, and no washing. Jesse, get Charger saddled up for me.”

Jesse scrambled off fast, and Dom went and got the maps out of the box under the wagon seat. He always kept the current one on top, easy to hand. He looked it over until he had the exact miles all in his head, every landmark and note memorized, and then he put them back inside. He took the binoculars, pulled himself up on Charger’s back, and slung a few of their smaller chemlights off the saddle horn.

Vince came over and handed him up a canteen. “Weren’t a lot of houses round that village we passed, last year. The one with the well.”

Dom looked down at him, steady, and Vince blew out a gusty sigh. “But you’re not going by the well, are you.”

“You saw the way those guys looked at the horses,” Dom said. “They would’ve put out a trade flag, if they’d had enough spare water for it.”

“There’s three thousand people down in the Valley, Dom!” Vince said. “Five hundred head of horse. I hear they got _guns_.”

“Yeah, you hear a lot of things, you listen to rumors,” Dom said. “Quit borrowing trouble. Keep an eye out, and if I’m not back before morning, get back on the road and keep moving: I’ll catch up.”

He let Charger shake his legs out for once: might as well take the good with the bad. They did a blazing-fast mile and a quarter before Dom reined him in, and the stallion tossed his head back and whinnied for the sheer joy of running, asking for more. “Yeah,” Dom said, rubbing his neck, “yeah, that’s it,” fierce with his own joy. Plodding along at the cart’s pace all this time, held back; it felt great to run, no matter why. 

They made it to the western rim of the canyon in a couple of hours, right near the southern edge where the old riverbed, long dry now, plunged down into the earth. Dom put up the binoculars and saw the cloud in the distance on the other side, the big spikeback herd he’d swung south to avoid just a couple of days ago. Spikebacks were bad news. Which was good news for him, now. He rode along the edge of the canyon until it started to get green, and then he picketed Charger near a little grass in the shade of a few scrub trees. “Anybody tries to grab you, bite them,” he said with a pat, and Charger snorted. 

Dom slung on the binoculars and the canteen and kept going on foot. It was late afternoon and the sun was slipping out of the canyon. He noticed lights down inside, even though it had to still be a mile or more to the settlement: faint purple gleam peeking out of notches in the walls like they had enough chemlight to waste on lighting parts of the canyon they didn’t even live in. It made him even more sure he wasn’t going for the well. Yeah, Vince was right, the well settlement was a hell of an easier target: half a dozen houses, barely a few fields, thin people. If it were down to a choice between their lives and his own people, Dom would’ve steeled his stomach and done anything he had to, but he wasn’t going to hit a bunch of poor people to save the horses, no matter how much it would hurt to put them down.

But he could raid _these_ people and sleep just fine after. He’d seen the Conner Valley traders in Landmark a couple of times, but he’d never shaken on a deal with them, he’d never even sat down at their booth. They sent women to do their trading, which made a lot of guys dumber than him think they were soft, but it was the other way around: for hospitality they poured a deadly iced tea laced with so much liquor that it could get a grown man sloshed in two of the big glasses they used, and he’d never seen anyone walk away from their table with anything better than a barely-fair deal.

Anyway, he was too poor to sit down with them. Maybe in a few years he could’ve talked to them about trading a horse, swapping bloodlines: they had some beautiful horses. He’d seen one of their guys on a gorgeous Akhal-Teke mare that he’d have given an arm to have and cross Charger with: cremello coat that gleamed even from across the market, delicate head with smart eyes, eyelashes as thick as a coat to keep the dust out; made to run the desert. But mostly they sold luxuries, wine, fruit and veg out of greenhouses; and they were only really in the market for heavy equipment, electronics, the kinds of stuff that the big ox haulers went into the dead cities to get.

They weren’t assholes in market, but that didn’t mean anything. Fort Verde’s traders had been nice in the market, too. They’d made fair deals; his dad had sat down at their table and drunk their whiskey half a dozen times. And then they’d shot him right outside their own gates, and if Dom hadn’t been watching, they would’ve taken out his whole family, too, taken their horses. Having a lot didn’t mean they wouldn’t take the little someone else had.

Dom had put the word out in the markets about Fort Verde afterwards, but most people hadn’t wanted to listen, not to a guy with a little clan, no stakehold of his own. He’d had to move their whole route south, add another month of travel time to get from summer to winter pasture and back. More chance each way of trouble, more chance of finding claim jumpers at either end. More chance of springing a leak in a water cask, two weeks of travel into the Dry with two more to go.

Dom started crouching lower to the ground as he reached the settled part of the canyon. There were lookout towers up here on either side, metal tripods with smooth bare legs and big searchlights mounted up at the top, with real solar panels on them. He wouldn’t have wanted those in his face on a nighttime raid. He stayed close to the edge and in among the scrub. Chances were they wouldn’t spot him. They weren’t looking for a single guy, they were watching the plain for bigger dangers: stampedes, cycle gangs, swarm clouds.

He was getting a good look of his own over the side. It looked like the homes were built right into the canyon walls. Light peeked out of arrow-slit windows, too narrow for a shrike to fit through, and big metal doors standing wide open for the cool night air to come in. A few miles further on, the canyon opened up wider into the real valley: all cropland, bigger fields than he’d ever seen stretching away with long glass greenhouses standing in the middle where they’d get the most sun through the day before the canyon walls shaded them.

It was pretty impressive. Dom had traveled wide, and he’d seen some big trading markets and a few big settlements, but nothing like that cropland. It made Fort Verde look second-rate, even with their spiked walls. It didn’t take a genius to look at those fields and know these people had serious wealth, and that meant serious firepower somewhere backing it up. Nobody in their right mind would try to hit this place. Head-on, anyway.

There were a half-dozen firepits going in the center of the community, people walking around, and the smell of cooking food climbed all the way up to his nose. It made his mouth water. He found a few bigger bushes and dug in a little, pulling some loose branches together to cover himself, and trained his binoculars out on the plain on the far side of the canyon, sweeping back and forth.

The sunset caught the dust cloud in the distance and made it orange, bright against the plain: the horses on their way home for the night. Dom watched them come the whole way, and could’ve kept watching: the flashing legs and tossing heads, the beautiful lines of them in every color there was. He even spotted the cremello mare and her rider again, along the edge of the running herd, and yeah, she was even more beautiful than he’d remembered: the end of a long hot day under a saddle, and there was still a bounce in her step like she could’ve kept going for hours more.

 But he wasn’t here to steal horses. Fuck, he wished he was here to steal horses. He could’ve picked out any ten of them blindfolded and not been sorry. But right now he couldn’t even keep the ones he already had, so he pulled his binoculars off the herd and got a good look at the watering-station instead. Yeah, like he’d hoped: nobody working the pumps. There were a good two dozen people standing around, but they were all waiting away from the troughs, and he could see some of them holding hoof picks and currycombs. The troughs were already full; they didn’t wait until the horses got back to fill them. And that meant a window of opportunity.

Dom waited a couple hours more before leaving. It wasn’t a hardship to sit there while the horses all got groomed and led into the stables, and safer not to take the chance of anyone spotting enough movement to make them wary tomorrow. It slowly got full dark, stars coming out overhead. There were so many people they ate in rounds: moms with little kids and babies first, then the other women, and after they all went inside the men came to the fires in two separate groups. The first group ate quick, and then scattered out across the canyon; Dom flattened himself and didn’t even move as he saw ten of them go scrambling up the canyon walls, shift change for the lookouts in the towers. Then a second group came in from all around the canyon and settled in, got comfortable, and the noise level went up and bottles came out.

It wasn’t a bad system: get your most vulnerable people under cover early, with all your men on alert, and then let half your guys kick up their heels while the other half went on watch. But Dom would’ve liked to see Letty and Mia stand for being sent inside early while the men stayed out and partied.

He stayed put a little longer. By then there was music going, and guys were even slipping off into dark corners in pairs, so apparently they even went _that_ far to keep the girls out of it. Dom rolled his eyes. But he didn’t think anybody was paying all that much attention to the top of the canyon anymore, and he slowly put off his brush covering and slipped away, going quicker once he got out of sight of the lookout tower. Charger was right where Dom had left him, the grass cropped down to nothing and the ground pawed a little in boredom, and he snorted and butted a complaint into Dom’s chest with his nose.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dom said, getting him loose. “I’m trying to keep you in water and mares, beast, so cut me some slack. Let’s get home.”

#

“I don’t like it,” Vince said.

“Why would you like it?” Dom said. “There’s nothing to like about it. But if there’s a better way for us to get water, I’m waiting to hear about it.”

“I don’t like it either,” Mia said. “Dom, why don’t we just talk to the people at the well instead? Maybe we could make a deal with them. What if we asked them to look after six horses, and offered to let them keep half the ones still alive when we get back?”

It wasn’t a bad plan, except for how it stuck too hard in Dom’s craw to just give up three horses, and take a gamble on another three. “Even if they were willing to try, they’d have a hard time doing it,” Dom said. “Not to mention what happens when we come back next year and want half our horses back, after they’ve spent a year feeding them.”

“Then why don’t we _ask_ the Valley?” Mia said. “They’ve got more than enough. Why wouldn’t they make a deal?”

“That’s what Dad thought about Fort Verde,” Dom said sharply. Mia looked away, biting her lip. “I’m sorry,” he said, more gently. “But we all know how this works. We go to the Valley straight on, they can do whatever the hell they feel like with us. Even if they’re not murderers, they can see we’re stuck. I don’t see any reason in the world why they’d do anything but offer us a cask for five horses and tell us we’re lucky to get it, since we can’t do anything else but butcher them for meat and cross our fingers the shrikes don’t catch the scent.”

Nobody else tried to argue. “Okay,” Dom said. “Mia, you and Jesse are gonna take the herd and the big wagon, keep heading west on our route, walking pace. Letty, you and Leon are going to get around behind those spikebacks. One hour before sunset, that’s when you stampede them. Me and Vince will take the cart and hit the troughs soon as the stampede gets close enough for the Valley to sound the alarm. Anything happens to the two of us, or we put up a flare, you start the stampede without waiting and run for Mia and Jesse quick as you can go. Me and Vince will get back to you if there’s any way we can, but otherwise, you have to write us off.

“I need you on board with that, Letty,” he added, seeing her face go hard. “Anything goes wrong, our only shot to get away is if we can clear the stampede before they get a pursuit after us, and if we _don’t_ clear the stampede, we’re just done.”

“Shit, this sucks,” she muttered, but he could see he’d made his point.

The worst part after that was waiting, the whole endless day. He and Vince took turns sleeping and keeping watch. The sun crept by slower than it ever had, seemed like, with the slow steady spikeback cloud coming closer and closer until Charger was pawing the ground and whuffing uneasily, his ears flicking. The cart horses stamped along with him, their nostrils wide and spooked. The sun kept going down and going down, and Dom nodded finally. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s ride.” He swung up, and Vince got onto the driver’s seat. In the distance, Dom could see the Conner Valley herd coming in, a second big dust cloud further to the east.

They went in at a slow trot until the lookout tower poked up into view. The troughs were out on the ground too, glittering bars in the sunset, and Dom let out a sigh: yeah, full of water. He glanced over at Vince and nodded, and they sprang the horses.

Charger leaped out in front, gleefully running. In just a couple of moments, Dom could make out the lookouts peering at him, light reflecting off their binoculars, and as he got closer, he yanked off his hat and waved it wildly, gesturing back behind him. He didn’t look around: he already knew what was coming into view behind him, and in an instant the bells started clanging the stampede warning. Another instant and half the lookouts were out of the tower and scrambling down the canyon wall to carry the alert. No panic, they had good discipline, smart. But it was also smart not to worry about a day’s worth of water when a spikeback stampede was heading for your house.

Nobody so much as spared him a blink of an eye when he got to the troughs and jumped down and let Charger drink from the first one, closest to the canyon. Vince was rattling up behind him. Dom waved him and the carthorses to the head of the same trough, which put the cart between the lookouts and the second trough. It was a big long one, but made of old tin pounded thin: in a minute he and Vince got under the sides and heaved it up with a grunt, tipping the end into the cask sitting in the back of the cart. Water sloshed off to every side, but most of it went waterfalling into the cask: filled it halfway up.

They dumped the trough. Vince grabbed the back end of the cart and hauled back on it, whistling to the horses, and backed them up to the end of the next trough. Dom heard shouting now; somebody had noticed what they were doing. “On three!” he shouted to Vince, and they grabbed the second trough and heaved, staggering. The water splashed a little more, but it was good enough, the cask was almost full to the top. Dom tamped down the lid while Vince scrambled up into the cart and got the reins. He shouted at the horses and drove off. Dom ran to Charger, who had his ears pricked up, interested as hell in something. Dom glanced back: shit, the Conner Valley herd was coming on the gallop; he was scenting the mares. 

“Yeah, sorry,” Dom said, throwing himself into the saddle. “Another time, buddy.” People were running up out of the canyon towards him, some looking after the disappearing cart. Dom wheeled Charger around to the side of the next trough and shouted, “Stop, or I’ll knock the rest of them over, too, and you won’t be able to water the herd before the stampede hits.”

It wasn’t much of a threat, but everything was working in his favor: all the leaders had to be down in the canyon, organizing; the only people still up here would just be hands, and most of them didn’t look like more than kids, uncertain. They did stop, hesitating and yelling to each other, not sure what the hell to do about him, and while they tried to figure it out Dom counted the carthorse strides in his head: Vince would have Cab and Cali running flat-out along the canyon edge, trusting the big dirt tires and the steel-spring suspension to keep the cart from coming to pieces under him.

Dom could smell the stampede by now, the rusty stink of spikebacks, and the ground was drumming underneath their weight. But every second he held the pursuit off was a second Vince got further away. Dom risked one quick glance off to the side: the stampede was a tornado-thick cloud now, coming fast towards the canyon edge; the herd of horses was running in too, and as the first ones came flying, Dom wheeled Charger around and ran for it.

“Son of a bitch!” he heard someone yell behind him. Dom wasn’t planning to worry about that: Charger could run away from anything on four legs, and the stampede was so near that Dom could make out the big spikebacks in the leading edge with their maddened heads down, yellow dust churning up from their big flat hooves and boiling away over their backs, coating their long tusks and the bristling silver spikes. The tiny slice of ground left between them and the canyon edge was shrinking with every second. But Vince had made it; Dom saw him get clear, and the cart vanished on the far side of the stampede cloud.

Nobody to worry about anymore but himself, and nothing for him to do, either: Charger was stretching out, running like a goddamn demon all on his own. Dom measured the closing distance with his eyes and nodded to himself: they were going to make it.

Then one of Charger’s ears flicked back and Dom nearly jerked with surprise, because the cremello mare’s nose was level with his stirrup, and she was inching up on them. Dom shot a look at the rider—blue eyes over a bandanna against the dust, furious as hell. _Shit_. All he needed to do was grab Charger’s reins for one stride and this would all be over.

Dom swore under his breath and dropped low over Charger’s withers, coaxing him on. Another couple minutes and they’d be too close to the stampede: unless this guy was nuts, he was going to have to pull off, because this was going to be close as they came, and _he_ wasn’t the one who had nothing to lose.

“Come on, baby,” he heard the guy shout to the mare: he was riding low and tight also. Her nose was at Charger’s shoulder. For once Dom wished he rode a little lighter.

Dom put his hand on Charger’s neck, started talking to him; he didn’t even know what he was saying, but Charger stretched a little further, pounding away the dirt, finding a little more speed somewhere Dom hadn’t even known he had. They pulled away for a stride, two, and then, god _damn_ it, the mare kept _coming_ , her rider solid in the corner of Dom’s eye, almost in arm’s reach—

—too late, because the ground was rumbling underneath them, and in a second, if Dom turned his head he’d be looking right into the eyes of a spikeback. He grinned a goodbye over at the other rider: _hell of a good try_. The guy glared back at him, teeth clenched even as his hands gathered on the reins: he didn’t want to have to quit, but it _wasn’t_ worth it for him—

And then one of the spikebacks in the leading edge tripped. Dom only just caught it out of the corner of his eye as the whole herd split around the bellowing, howling beast, and suddenly there were _two_ stampedes coming, one behind them and one in front of them, both heading for the canyon’s edge with a crowd about to come trampling over the fallen spikeback into the middle. He traded one horrified, split-second look with the mare’s rider, and then they were both riding for their lives, desperately, before the stampede in front cut them off.

Meters of ground were melting away faster than they could get to them, the canyon’s edge crumbling under the mare’s hooves and spikeback tusks coming for Charger’s side, both horses neck and neck now, running, _flying_. The last hole was disappearing: Dom ripped off his hat and threw it into the face of the nearest spikeback, made it duck its tusks down one extra inch. Charger jumped, the cremello mare stretched, and they plunged through and made it, impossibly: more ground opening up in front of them. Behind them, the first spikebacks went bellowing into the canyon, plummeting over the edge and disappearing in a roar of hooves and dirt.

They cleared the front edge of the herd in just a couple more minutes. The mare’s rider yelled, “Holy _shit!_ ” as the horses slowed, and Dom glanced over, found himself grinning helplessly at the guy, because goddamn right, holy shit. The rider was grinning back, just as wide and helpless. Then one big spikeback swerved off the herd right behind them and let out a bellow like twenty fucking horns going off at once. The mare startled wild and bucked up her heels with a twist, catching the rider off guard, and he went flying right off over her head. He slammed into the ground, knocked his head against a rock, and didn’t get up again.

“Ah, shit,” Dom said, staring down at him.

#

“What the hell d’you bring him back for?” Vince said, frowning. The rider was sprawled on the cot in the back of the wagon. He was pretty out of it. He’d made some muffled groans along the way, sagged against Dom’s chest, and one time he’d woken up enough to call him a fucking asshole and yell about being let go. Dom had let him climb down off Charger, but then the guy had just thrown up and sunk to his knees, and he hadn’t seemed to have a clear plan for how to get back on his horse, much less get back home, so Dom had just heaved him back over his saddle and kept going.

“What was I going to do, let him walk off the canyon edge or get trampled by the spikebacks?” Dom said. “What do you think, Mia?” he asked, to stop Vince answering him. He didn’t know why he’d brought the guy back; Vince was right that it made no sense. But he hadn’t been able to just leave him there on the ground.

“I don’t really know,” she said; she was trying to shine a chemlight into his eyes, but the guy kept groaning and turning away from it. “I think we just have to wait and see. If it’s a bad concussion or worse, his brain might start swelling. He might need trepanning.”

“Whoa, like, cut a hole in his _skull?_ ” Jesse said, peering over wide-eyed from the driver’s seat, ghoulishly interested.

“No!” the guy said muffled, from behind the arm he’d thrown over his face. “No cutting holes in my skull!”

Mia leaned out over the back of the wagon. “Dom, he shouldn’t try to ride anytime soon. Swelling in the brain can start as late as five days after a concussion.”

“We stay here five days, we might as well fire up a few flares while we’re at it to make sure they can find us,” Vince said. “Dom—”

“Yeah, I got it,” Dom snapped. He ran a hand over his head. “We’re not waiting,” he said after a moment. “He can ride in the wagon. When he gets better, we’ll give him food and water and he can ride back.”

“Ride back for five days?” Mia said, glaring down at him. “Alone, through the Dry? Why do you want me to bother saving him in the first place?”

“Then he can stay with us instead if he wants,” Dom said.

“Are you _kidding_ me?” Vince said, and even Mia blinked at him, surprised. “First chance that asshole gets, he’s gonna slit our throats, take the horses, and head back home.”

“ _I’m_ an asshole? Fuck you, _water thief_ ,” the guy said faintly from inside the wagon, trying to struggle up onto an elbow. He gave up on that idea really quick and went back down, though. 

“Yeah, I guess you’d better keep a close eye on him, he looks real dangerous,” Dom said, waving a hand at the muffled groaning coming out of the back of the wagon.

Vince scowled and then did stomp around to the wagon seat. “I’ll drive,” he told Jesse, hauling himself up.

But Mia was still frowning. “Dom,” she said slowly. “Did he— _do_ something? I thought you just said he chased you, nearly caught you.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Dom said shortly. “Just do what you can.” He walked away back to Charger, who was already busy making up to the cremello mare from the other side of the hot mash Letty had given the horses: stomping his feet, tossing his head, squealing; showing off and trying to get her to pay attention to him. She wasn’t really having any of it; she had her ears pinned back and kept lifting her head anxiously, nostrils flaring, looking over at the wagon. Dom gave her neck a pat. “Sorry, bella,” he told her. “We’ll get him back to you.” That was why, he guessed; it just felt like such a fucking waste. Everyone in his family was a great rider, but he’d never seen any horse and rider move like that except him and Charger: like one beast, connected, fearless.

#

They rode through the night and the next day, slow and careful but steady, putting as many miles between them and the Valley as they could. The rider slept most of the time, at least when Mia wasn’t lifting up his eyelids and touching his face to make sure his head wasn’t about to pop or anything. A couple of hours after sunset, they reached one of the shelters on his map, a big rock outcrop tall enough to anchor the folding lean-to, and Dom finally called a real halt; everyone was stumbling-tired, and the horses couldn’t keep going even at a walk.

Dom still wasn’t worried about the rider that much, but he climbed into the wagon and took the second cot there himself, just in case. He slept like a log until it started to get light and something woke him: he opened his eyes and found the rider awake and rubbing his face, groaning faintly but looking a lot less muddled.

“Any better?” Dom asked.

“Yeah, no thanks for asking,” the guy said, sourly. He dropped his hands and turned his head on the pillow to glare at Dom. “Where’s Skyline?”

“She’s fine,” Dom said: he didn’t need to ask who the guy meant. “She got a good rubdown and a hot mash, her feet are okay. Charger’s gonna give you a hard time when you’re ready to ride away, though.” He figured that was the best way to make it clear they weren’t going to try to keep him, or his horse. The guy got the message. He still didn’t look happy, but he relaxed a little.

“Where the hell did you get that horse?” he said. 

“Bred him,” Dom said, with a shrug, trying not to sound a quarter as proud as he was. “His sire was mostly a Friesian and his dam was half Morgan, half mutt, close as we could tell. How’d you get an Akhal-Teke out here?”

“We caught some stock gone wild from an old breeding farm, a few days east out past Landmark,” the guy said. Then he paused, frowning. “Hey, that’s where I’ve seen you guys. You’ve been at the market.”

Dom swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up, trying not to think about how much it was going to suck if this guy got back home and blackballed them out of the southern markets. “You want a cup of coffee?” he said shortly.

“That you’re going to brew with the water you _stole_ from us?” the guy said, pushing himself up.

“Yeah, that water,” Dom said.

The guy snorted. “Sure, why not.”

They got out of the wagon. Dom glanced up: Letty was watching them from the lookout point, up on the low outcropping at their backs with the sky getting light behind her. She flashed Dom an _all-clear_ , so at least there wasn’t a posse in sight. Everybody else was still sacked out in their bedrolls inside the lean-to, the horses dozing on their picket lines.

He bent down to stir up the fire and put the waiting coffeepot over the coals. The rider had gone straight to Skyline: running his hands over her legs without really waking her up; she butted him with her nose once and went back to sleep. He came over to the fire pit and lowered himself down to one of the logs they’d rolled up as seats, with another soft groan. “So tell me something, what the hell made you pick _us_ to raid? There’s five or six little settlements around the scrublands, less than a day’s ride.”

“Yeah,” Dom said, poking the fire. “Little places, barely squeezing enough water out of the rock to keep going. You guys had a month of water for us sitting in two troughs: how bad could you miss it?”

“Oh, fuck you,” the guy said, indignant. “We pump it out of the aquifer by hand, twenty-four hours a day, and if you think that’s easy, you can spend a few weeks on the pumps and tell me how you like it after. You could’ve _asked_.”

“And you’d just have given it to us, huh?” Dom said.

“You had that stallion cover five of our mares, you could’ve had all the water you wanted.”

“Yeah, but if you’d taken him, you could’ve had him cover all the mares you wanted.”

“Nice,” the guy said, folding his arms. “So because we _might_ have been complete fucking assholes, that’s your excuse for being a complete fucking asshole to us.”

“Your shelters are in the canyon walls,” Dom said. “We got you warning in time to get everybody in, and now you’ve got a herd’s worth of spikeback meat and leather to use.”

“Wow, the goodness of your heart,” the guy said. Dom glanced up and met his eyes, and then they were cracking up together a little, choking it down softly in the early light.

“Yeah, all right,” Dom said, acknowledging. He _was_ sorry, now; if he’d known this guy before— He shrugged it off mentally; hindsight. He stuck out a hand for apology. “Dominic Toretto.”

“Brian Spilner,” the guy said after a moment, and took it. He took the cup of coffee, too, and drank it black and hot, looking over the horses. “You bred all of these?”

“Yeah,” Dom said. “My family, anyway. Takes a while, we can’t raise more than a couple of foals a year.”

Brian glanced at him. “No stakehold?”

“Not yet,” Dom said. Brian looked back at the horses, and Dom knew he’d gotten it: the amount of water they’d taken, how many horses that meant, what it would’ve cost them.

“You’re still an asshole,” Brian said.

“Fair enough,” Dom said. He looked out from the curve of the outcrop: he could see the hills with the old blackdust mine up ahead, maybe twenty miles away, so they’d covered almost a hundred miles of country from the Valley already. A long way to ride alone, and he wanted to cover a lot more ground before they slowed down any. “How’s the head feel? I know Mia doesn’t want you to ride yet.”

Brian rubbed his head, grimacing. “Yeah, I think I’d better stick around a little longer. Anyway, chances are the posse’s going to catch you by the end of the day.”

Dom eyed him. “Oh, you cover fifty miles in a day just like that, huh?”

“Our posse goes Mongol style, pal,” Brian said. “Four horses to a rider: I’ve done a _hundred_ miles in a day. And after you dumped an entire herd of spikebacks on our heads, my guys are going to be pretty fucking motivated.”

“Shit,” Dom muttered.

Brian snorted. “Yeah. Just as a suggestion, I wouldn’t try your gift stampede story on the chief when you meet her, either.”

“I’m not planning on meeting her,” Dom said. “There’s a lot of empty miles out here, even at a hundred a day.”

Brian grinned at him. “Want to bet on it?”

“Are you gonna put up that mare?” Dom said.

“What the hell,” Brian said. “I can’t make it home alone anyway. Fine. Posse catches us by tomorrow morning, or you get Skyline. And if they _do_ catch us, that stallion’s mine.”

“Why not,” Dom said. “They catch us, I don’t think I’m going to be doing any riding anytime soon.”

He poured Brian another cup of coffee, and they sat together watching the sun come up the rest of the way: everyone started stirring and waking up, and Mia came over and took the coffee out of Brian’s hand. “Hey!” he said.

“You shouldn’t have caffeine with a concussion,” she said. “Have some water instead.”

“Man, this is cruel and unusual,” Brian said mournfully up at her, and Vince stomped over to the fire and jerked his chin at him and demanded, “He well enough to pull his own weight today or what?”

“Would that be my weight in _water?_ ” Brian said, sitting up, spark in his eye.  

“He’s well enough to work when Mia says he’s well enough to ride,” Dom said. “Everybody get your coffee and then saddle up: we’re not eating until first break today.” There were complaints all around, but everyone got themselves up and moving.

Brian did take care of his own horse, and hooked her on a lead line to the back of the wagon with a look that dared anybody to argue with him—mostly Vince, who scowled back. Dom sighed, great, what the fuck was up with Vince anyway.

Letty snorted quietly as they pulled out, Blitz falling in line with Charger at the head of their line. “You serious about keeping this guy on?”

“What else are we gonna do with him?” Dom said. “Anyway, if you’d seen him ride, you wouldn’t ask me that question. What’ve you got against him?”

“I haven’t got anything against him,” Letty said. “Mia might like to, though.”

“What?” Dom said.

“Toretto, have you _looked_ at the guy?”

Dom glanced back towards the wagon: Brian was sitting up on the cot, chatting with Mia over the wagon back. “What? Rides about one eighty?”

Letty rolled her eyes. “He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen,” she said. “And if _you_ haven’t noticed, Mia sure has.”

Dom frowned. Vince hadn’t made any secret of how he felt about Mia. Dom had hoped maybe she just wasn’t ready, and he’d made clear to Vince if that was it, he’d be waiting as long as it took until she was. But he’d had the bad feeling that if she’d wanted him, she’d have done something about it by now. Looked like he’d been right, and now if she wanted somebody else—

Yeah, it was going to be a mess, he could see that plain enough. But at the same time, Dom couldn’t help thinking it would make one hell of an incentive for a man to stay, if he had a brain and eyes in his head, which Brian pretty clearly did.

Letty was eyeing him sidelong. “You’re really gone on this guy, aren’t you? You know if his people ever catch us, they’re going to string us up as soon as they find a tree.”

“So we better not let them catch us,” Dom said with finality, and nudged Charger into a trot.

#

He did make a point of it when they stopped at a jumble of rocks and big saguros, finally, around ten; while everyone else took care of the horses and started to put some food together and hacked open one of the cactuses for juice, he said, “Come on, Spilner, let’s see if I’m going to lose that bet,” and took Brian around up to the overlook. Brian had slept a little more in the wagon on the way, and he wasn’t looking much like a guy with a concussion anymore: he climbed easily over the rocks, keeping up with Dom no problem. The countryside behind them was still empty, no dust cloud of a posse anywhere in sight, and the wind was blowing straight towards them from the direction of the Valley.

“Looks like you’ll be with us a while longer,” Dom said.

“We’ll see,” Brian said. He didn’t seem too broken up about it, but that could’ve been for more than one reason.

“So we’re clear on this: you’re welcome to stick around as long as you want to,” Dom said abruptly. “But if you’re not planning on staying for the long haul, don’t let my sister get the idea that you are.”

Brian didn’t act like he didn’t know what Dom was talking about. “We do things a little different in the Valley,” he said after a moment.

Dom snorted. “You mean like that bullshit of sending your women inside while the guys stay out for the fun?”

Brian raised his eyebrow way up. “Man, have you got the wrong idea.”

“I have, huh?” Dom said.

“The _mosquitoes_ are outside,” Brian said. “The women go in for _their_ party. But yeah, we mostly live apart, is the thing. We don’t— All our kids are planned.”

“So what, you don’t get laid otherwise?” Dom said.

Brian gave him a pointed look back. “We get _laid_ plenty,” he said, and suddenly all the guys slipping off together from their campfires made a lot more sense. “So if you’re asking whether I’m interested—hell yeah, I’m interested. But not in the same thing you’re talking about. Your sister’s a doctor, a great rider, smart, beautiful—I’d be an idiot not to want a woman like that for the mother of my kids. But the only person I’d be making a pass at around here is _you_.”

Dom stared at him, and Brian added, “Don’t get too excited. I’m still pretty pissed-off about the stampede and the water-stealing.”

“Yeah, my loss,” Dom said dryly.

Brian grinned at him suddenly, dazzling, blue eyes sparkling. “You better believe it,” he said, and shit, now Dom _was_ noticing, the hell.

Brian scrambled down the rocks as easily as he’d come up, and when Mia peered at his eyes, she looked satisfied, and Dom didn’t think that was just because they were pretty. They stopped again for a short break at the base of the hills, to give the horses water, and Brian wheedled her into letting him get back into the saddle. “For an hour, to start,” she said. “And if you start getting dizzy, don’t keep quiet. You fall off and hit your head a second time, you’re asking for brain damage.”

“I hate to break it to you, but the shocks you have in this wagon, I think my brain’s getting rattled around pretty badly anyway,” Brian said, already getting Skyline’s saddle off the cart and whistling her over.

Vince wound up in an even worse mood after Brian mounted and took Skyline for a quick shakedown. Letty glanced over at Dom and gave him a little nod, _I see what you were talking about_ , and Mia wasn’t even hiding the fact she was watching him. Hell, Dom was watching, too: it was a pleasure to look at them, Skyline all rested up and prancing after almost three days with no rider, beautiful action. Brian barely even held the reins, doing it all with leg, so light you almost couldn’t see it, like the horse was just reading his mind.

“No headache, you’re sure?” Mia asked, when he trotted back in.

“Not even a little,” he said, practically glowing.

She made him ride next to Dom, in case he fell off. Dom kept them at the rear; Brian had started taking a look around behind him maybe every fifteen minutes, like he was expecting a cloud to come into view sometime soon, and Dom had the bad feeling one of these times it was going to be there. “Or are you just fucking with me?” he said irritably, after the fifth time Brian turned in the saddle.

“Nah,” Brian said. “If they don’t show up by the end of the day today, it’s because they thought you were from Fort Verde—what did I say?”

“Nothing,” Dom said tightly; his hands had gone hard on the reins, and Charger had snorted, feeling it. “You’ve had trouble with Fort Verde?”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “We’ve been plowing under the northern half of the Valley for a couple of seasons now, getting ready to put it into crops. We weren’t planning to open up for new stakeholders for a couple more years, but they saw the writing on the wall, and I guess they don’t like the idea of having us on their border. They’ve run raids against us a few times. If my people thought they were behind this, the posse would’ve gone north, first.” He raised an eyebrow at Dom. “Don’t worry, even if they did go that way, they’d be swinging around west right about now.”

“Haven’t got anything to worry about,” Dom said coolly.

A few minutes later, Brian glanced around back _again_. Dom gritted his teeth and then finally gave up and looked back, too. Still no pursuing cloud. This time when he looked back, Brian was grinning at him. “Yeah, okay, that time I was screwing with you,” he said.

“Lucky for you my sister would get pissed at me if I gave you another concussion,” Dom growled, and then he jerked around as Letty shouted, “Dom! Dom, get the hell up here!”

He shot one look at Brian, who just looked baffled, and then sent Charger scrambling up the hill trail past the wagon, Skyline on his heels. All the horses had bunched up together at the crest of the hill with their ears flattened back against their heads, everyone staring west, frozen.

“It can’t be shrikes,” Jesse said in a small voice. “It’s too big.”

There was nothing else it could be, though: the wide formation solid black against the sky, the two V shapes nested, the little ones on the inside and the big ones on the outside. But it was the biggest swarm Dom had ever seen.

“The stampede,” Brian said flatly, behind him. He was right, had to be. The wind had been blowing at their backs steadily all the way: the shrikes must’ve gotten a whiff of the slaughter. Probably more than one swarm of them, bunched up together to head for a big feast.

Brian kneed Skyline up next to him and grabbed Dom’s arm. “You need to send someone to warn the Valley,” he said. “They won’t have been able to process even half that herd by now, there’s going to be dead spikebacks and meat hung out to dry all over the canyon, in every house—”

“Why don’t _you_ go?” Vince said, belligerent the way he got when he was scared. Brian wheeled on him.

“That’s a fucking thousand-shrike swarm, you asshole, and you aimed them right at my people,” he said, savage. “So you’re going to _send them a_ _fucking_ _warning_ , and I’m going to lure the swarm into the mine.”

Nobody said anything; even Vince swallowed. Brian turned back to Dom. “Will you trade for Skyline?” he said tightly—because he didn’t want to have to cut her, bleed her, to lure the shrikes to him. Because he didn’t want to watch them rip the flesh off her bones before they killed him, too. “A gelding, one of the carthorses—”

“Shut the hell up!” Dom said, and turned. “Vince. Take the string and head back to the Valley, warn them what’s coming. Take the mare with you. We’ll leave the wagon and the cart, use Cab and Cali for the lure—”

“What? The fuck, Dom!” Vince and Letty were yelling at the same time, and Mia was reaching out to him in protest, stricken. “The hell are you thinking—”

“The entrance corridor to the mine is too wide for one man to hold,” Dom said. “Two have a chance—”

“Against a thousand fucking shrikes?” Vince said. “Dom, that’s bullshit!”

“I put that fucking stampede in the canyon!” Dom roared at him, shutting him up. “What do you think I’m going to do, get under cover and hide, let them fly past me to tear up a bunch of women and kids? This isn’t up for a vote. I’m staying.”

“Fuck you, Toretto!” Letty shouldered Blitz up to Charger’s side and jabbed a finger in Dom’s chest. “We _all_ put that stampede in the canyon. If you’re stupid enough to do this, then so the fuck are we.”

#

“Dom,” Mia said in protest, her eyes full of tears, but she’d never spent a lot of time fighting, not like the rest of them, and somebody had to go.

“You and Jesse take the herd, make the best time you can,” Dom said. They were all pouring water out of one cask into canteens, into gunny sacks that could just be slung off the saddles; they’d dumped a bunch of the grain into the wagon bed to make room. If they were alive tomorrow morning, they’d have a hell of a time repacking, but the odds of that weren’t good enough to worry about it much. “You know as well as anybody how far you can push them.”

“Dom, I can stay, I can help,” Jesse said, but Dom took him by the shoulder and steered him over to his gelding.

“Mia can’t handle the whole string alone,” he said. “You’ve got to go with her, Jesse. Get on up, go on.”

They were ready in less than an hour, and the formation was already bigger in the distance: a couple of hours’ flight away, no more. Dom put his hands on Charger’s head, drew in one last breath of him, warm, grassy horse-smelling, and gave Jesse the lead. Brian pulled two swords out from under Skyline’s saddle flap, short and long, and then he boosted Mia up onto her back. He looked up. “When you meet my mother,” he said, “tell her that I said you’re Willow Tree. Okay? She’ll get what it means. If you tell them you’ve got news about me and you won’t tell anyone but her, they’ll let you see her.”

Five minutes later, they’d already vanished into the cloud of their own passage, heading back east. “All right,” Dom said. “Let’s get to the mine.”

Cab and Cali nickered a little after the rest of their herd, but they followed Dom willingly to the mine opening. Vince and Leon unhitched while Dom stood by their heads: rubbing their noses, talking to them low, nonsense words. They’d always been so good and steady; not enough speed to make Dom’s heart lift, but they’d been pulling the wagon since before his dad had died. They were part of as much home as he had in the world.

Brian was looking east, shading his eyes and watching the swarm come in. He turned and came to Dom. “They’re pretty high up,” he said. “We’d better get the lure out soon, or we’ll risk them missing it. You want me to do it?”

“I’ll do it,” Dom said. Brian nodded. Vince and Leon were rolling the last water cask into the mine.

Letty came out from hanging all their chemlights along the tunnel, wiping blackdust off her face. “Yeah, that inner door is still there, that room at the top of the vertical shaft,” she said. “It’s not going to hold against shrikes all that long, though. Rock’s too soft.”

“It won’t have to,” Dom said. “Go ahead and get Cab inside the door. I’ll bleed Cali, and then back her down the tunnel. We’ll stop the bleed once we’ve got her far enough in, and then you’ll take her behind the door, too. Me and Brian will start just inside the entryway, hold it as long as we can. When they push us back to the door, you’ll put Cab out, and while they’re fighting over him, the three of you swap in and let me and Brian take a rest. We’ll use Cali to do another switch when we’re ready to go back in.”

He knew chances were most of that plan wasn’t going to get used. The shrikes would probably slip past them in the tunnel, surround him and Brian and rip them to pieces. Then  they’d head for the smell of blood and meat behind the door, batter away the walls around it until they made a hole through, and then they’d tear everyone else apart, too. The door was made of old metal, dead-city old, but the walls up here were just soft limestone.

“They make it past us and hit the door, you all stake out Cab and Cali and get as far down the shaft as you can, hide out inside the mine,” Dom added, for what that was worth. Shrikes could smell meat from fifty miles away on a still day, and they could see in the dark about as well as they could see in the day.

“Dom,” Vince said. “It should be me and you, for the first wave.”

“I’m staying out,” Brian said. “You can handle the rest of it however you want.”

Vince glared at him, but Dom caught him by the arm. “We don’t know how he fights,” he said, quietly. “I know how _you_ fight. I want you with Letty and Leon. He can at least watch my back, and if he’s good, me and him’ll hold out long as we can. Either way, it’s the right call.”

“Fine,” Vince muttered, and shouldered his big spiked club.

“How many you think it’ll take to gorge them out?” Leon blurted.

Nobody answered him. Letty gave him a shove. “Get your ass inside,” she said, and threw Dom one last look before she ducked through the tunnel entrance herself. Vince took Cab and went after them, pushing his head down to get him inside.

Dom took out his knife and led Cali a few steps out from the entrance. “Do me a favor and hold her head,” Dom said, and Brian nodded and took a good hold. Cali jerked when the knife went in, lowing and unhappy, and she didn’t get any more happy as the blood spilled down off her chest. Brian held her as she tried to toss her head.

Dom let it collect until there was a big shining puddle on the rock, trickling away in rivulets. They backed Cali into the tunnel together, slowly, leaving the blood trail. She was beginning to panic, trying to get loose. Dom kept his hand on her neck, murmuring apologies, gut twisting. Finally they got her nearly to the big iron door. Dom squeezed the edges of the cut shut and slapped on a piece of gauze and covered it with three thick pieces of duct tape. Vince came out and took her away inside, and then he and Letty pulled the door shut behind them.

Back outside, the V formations had already dipped in the sky, stooping towards them. Dom took a deep breath, a long pull of water from his canteen, and went to take a leak in the bushes. Brian met him back at the tunnel mouth. They stood just inside the entrance, watching, until the leading edge of the swarm was almost on them. They didn’t need to discuss the plan. They backed into the tunnel a little way, just enough to force the shrikes to crowd in and fight for space with each other. A little sunlight still reached them, reflecting off the stone. Dom settled his big metal shield on his left arm, and Brian took up position on his right, both of those swords held low, loose, waiting. They were both thin narrow blades. Dom hoped they’d hold up.

The little shrikes came in first, sneaking around while the big ones considered the entrance, how to get inside. They came down the tunnel little by little, hopping and making little high noises to each other, like chirps. Dom had never seen live shrikes this close. A dead one, once, in the market, preserved in a big glass jar full of spirits that you had to pay a five cent chit to see. His dad had taken him to see. They were shaped like the birds the stories said they’d started out as, long black feathers sleek over their bodies and their wings, short snub piranha-shape beaks with two jagged-edged ridges like serrated knives, set off from each other to saw through anything they got hold of. The talons had the same dull grey metallic shine, mostly hidden under layers of dried grimed-up blood.

It was pretty late in the fall: even the littlest ones were mostly the size of a greyhound by now. They dipped their heads into the runnel of blood on the ground and took little sips, then came hopping along to find the source. They always liked to start with wounded animals, when they could get them. Their eyes were bright and green in the dark, tilting up, curious, smelling warm bodies and blood inside them. The chirping got louder, louder, and then abruptly they were in the air, wings beating, coming at them.

Dom bashed a swath of them away against the wall with a sweep of the shield, ready to slash his sword to keep others off in the meantime. He didn’t have to. Brian’s swords were there instead. He went for the biggest shrike out of the bunch, sliced a neat X across the chest so its blood jetted wide, and the rest of the little shrikes turned on it in a frenzy, tearing apart the wounded one.

Dom darted a look at him, gave Brian a quick nod, got one back: they’d gotten each other’s measure, too. Dom had wanted to trust Brian at his side, just on gut instinct; now he knew he could. They were going to be able to hold, at least for a while.

As soon as each shrike got a scrap of meat, they went darting back out with their prizes, fast. They’d be back for more, though, and the smell of blood was bringing others in. Brian speared another one as it jumped for his eyes, shrilling, and threw it off the end of his sword with a flick of his arm, sending several of them wheeling around back towards the dead one. Dom swept his bigger sword through the confused cloud, catching another couple. That bought them a moment as the rest went for them. A few of the ones Dom had knocked into the wall were still lying on the ground, dazed. Brian stuck them and kicked them back towards the entrance, too.

The shrilling was filling the tunnel by now, echoing off the walls, a horrible sound, except they were making it eating each other and not them, so Dom was prepared to put up with it. There was even enough time to grab a quick swallow off his canteen before the swarm tore through the rest of the dead and the wounded, and the ones still going hungry came back at them looking for more.

They fought through another couple of passes, finding a rhythm with each other: Dom cleared some room and Brian picked off one or two of the bigger ones, his narrow swords darting out faster than the shrikes. When the swarm turned in on itself, they took turns: one of them slicing through the cloud with bigger sweeps, while the other one took a drink and rested his arms. There wasn’t any need to make it more complicated: shrikes weren’t big on strategy, just appetite. It was just the _numbers_ of them: Dom tried to figure how many they’d taken out so far. It had to have been ten or so, maybe fifteen; felt like a lot, but it was a drop in the bucket, and sooner or later, one of them was going to get lucky.

A new rising shriek broke through the noise, all the little ones dropping silent like they’d been switched off, and suddenly one of the big ones was shouldering into the tunnel—maybe sixteen hands at the shoulder, with the two claws at the top of the wing joint. It clawed at the walls savagely from side to side with its wings and beak, crumbling away the rock like it was loose dirt, and it shrieked again, banshee wail that made Dom’s knees want to lock up. He heard Cab and Cali whinnying in fear, down the tunnel, and like that was a siren call the big shrike came rushing right at them.

“Shit!” Dom yelled, at the top of his lungs, and he threw himself into the middle of the tunnel, dropping to his knees and bracing behind the shield. The top edge was just at beak-height. The shrike slammed into him: like taking a pair of rear hooves right to the chest, full strength. Dom skidded ten feet and went over onto his back, just barely managing to hold up the shield. The shrike was on top of him, clawing and biting at the shield furiously, smelling meat somewhere behind it, scrape of its claws against the metal. It was all Dom could do to keep the shield in place.

Then blood suddenly came waterfalling down over the edges, and there were little shrikes everywhere, shrilling again, jumping. Brian’s hand came down under the top edge of the shield, grabbed Dom under his arm and helped him get his feet back under him, the big shrike sliding off the shield with one last clawing scrape as Dom staggered back. It vanished under a furious cloud of little ones ripping.

“Thanks,” Dom said hoarsely.

“Sure,” Brian said. They were both shaking, and they’d lost a big chunk of tunnel. It was almost impossible to see the entrance now: shrikes were crowding into the mouth. But around them Dom could see the light was going orange outside: sunset coming. He looked at Brian, who nodded, and he reached out and yanked the first chemlight ripcord. Purple light went running along the line of the tunnel, shining on black feathers, silvery bone, and the wet shine of blood. A few of the shrikes lifted their heads to peer at them, but there was still a lot of meat left to keep them busy, as many of them as could even fit in the tunnel.

But the other big ones were getting impatient. A wash of orange-red light came in from outside: the big ones were bashing at the entrance, opening it up wider, and then the corpse of the big one went sliding out of the tunnel with all the little ones still on it in a cloud, hopping and trying to get in a last few bites. Dom didn’t even wait to look at Brian; he charged forward behind the shield, getting back as much of the lost room as he could. Some of the little shrikes came at them, but Brian was right there with him, cutting them out of the air, throwing them down the tunnel as hard as he could to lure the others back that way, and they got back almost all the distance they’d lost.

They had to stop mostly because there wasn’t as much _tunnel_ left: the big ones had bashed the mouth twice as wide, opening up the mountainside a good way. Dom could even glimpse outside: a couple of them mantling at each other, standing over the half-eaten corpse of the dead one. They were both bigger than that one had been.

Brian was looking out at them, too, the light washing him in gold, shrike blood streaked across his skin like war paint. He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much need to talk about what kind of odds they had of making it through the night, with those things out there. “You okay?” Dom said.

“Not a scratch, so far,” Brian said. He wiped sweat from his forehead, wiped off his thin leather gloves on his legs, too. They were pale grey, with a metallic shine: he held one up. “Shrikeskin,” he said wryly. “Guess I dressed for the occasion.”

Dom snorted. “Pretty fancy, Spilner. Do all you Valley boys wear shrikeskin and carry dead steel?” He figured those swords had to be made of something special; even against shrike hide they didn’t seem to be losing their edge any.

Brian grinned at him, and then the little ones were coming back, another wave, and there wasn’t anything but fighting, but lifting his arm, over and over. It felt endless, but at least Brian was next to him, moving with him and around him. It was like riding with Charger: Dom could feel Brian there like his sense of his own body had expanded outward. He knew when Brian needed a break, got cover when he needed one himself; they passed canteens and bars of pressed fruit and nuts when they could. They kept fighting.

The sun went all the way down. The next big one came at them a little while after that, maybe three or four waves in: even bigger than the first one, cracking the roof of the tunnel against its back and snapping with a beak the size of a pony’s head. There wasn’t going to be any holding this one on his shield. Dom looked at Brian, got a nod back, then stuck his sword into the ground. He grabbed the shield side-on with both hands, waited, and as the shrike lunged forward he shoved the other side of the shield right into its beak.

The shrike bit into the metal, getting a grip even on the hard steel, and yanked. Dom’s feet came off the ground. It flung its head back even harder, almost threw him right into the roof of the tunnel, but Brian had dived forward into the opening, rolling. He came up on his knees right at the shrike’s chest and plunged both his swords into its ribcage, behind the breastbone, and ripped it open along the sides in two big gashes.

Dom hit the ground with the shield clattering down after. He left it lying on the ground and lunged forward. He managed to drag Brian out from under the shrike’s thrashing body as the swarm of little ones descended. Brian stuffed one of his swords under his arm and hooked the shield, and Dom grabbed up the broadsword as they staggered away down the tunnel.

They sank down on a couple of rocks, panting, while the feeding frenzy went on. Brian speared one little shrike that tried to take its chances with them, but mostly the little ones were too busy grabbing everything they could off the body.

“They’re from that dead city,” Brian said, like they hadn’t even stopped talking. He was resting the sword tips on the ground in front of his boots, blood sheeting off them like even that couldn’t stick. “The one up north.”

“The one with the bridge?” Dom said. Brian nodded. “That place is still pretty hot, isn’t it?”

“You can’t go into the city itself,” Brian said. “But if you take a meter, skirt the edges, there are some factories on the outside that are clean. I went up there when I was sixteen, did my trial.”

Dom gave him a look. “Your adulthood trial.”

“Yeah,” Brian said.

“And you did a dead city run,” Dom said levelly. “Alone.”

Brian was grinning at him a little sheepish. “I might’ve felt like I had something to prove.”

“I don’t know if you get to date my sister after all, Spilner,” Dom said.

“Hey, man, I got better,” Brian said. “What did _you_ do?”

Dom looked away. “Fort Verde cut down my dad and Vince’s when I was fifteen,” he said. “Never got around to it, after that.”

Brian nodded a little. He looked over as the dead shrike shifted in the tunnel mouth: the big ones outside trying to grab hold of it. “Hey,” he said suddenly, “if we pinned the body—”

The beak made a scraping noise over rock as the body was dragged out of the tunnel, and it was too late for this time, but Dom kept the idea in his head anyway, while they fought the next waves of little ones.

He didn’t know how long it had been. They’d had to pull another chemlight, but all that told him was it had been at least half an hour and less than ten; they weren’t that predictable. He had no sense of the time in his head at all, and he couldn’t feel it in his body, either; sword and shield took different muscles than riding, or even loading and unloading. He tried to get in an hour with them every few days, but when he did, it was a solid hour, no breaks; he was getting breaks every five or ten minutes here.

“How long do you think?” he asked Brian, in a gasp between waves, before gulping a swallow from the canteen.

“No clue,” Brian panted back, taking his own. “Call it an hour a chemlight?”

Dom nodded to himself: chemlights usually lasted longer than that, but an hour was a safe guess. Maybe they could get through three hours of the night, maybe even four, before they switched off with Vince and the others. He got another swallow of water and finished off a food bar, and then the shrikes were coming again.

There were shrike bones littering the floor of the tunnel, now, picked clean and silver. They’d been kicking them forward every chance they got, just getting them out of the way. But now Dom kept an eye out, and when he spotted a longer one he picked it up and tossed it backwards instead, behind them. Brian was doing the same thing, until they had maybe a dozen of them back there, and then another big one was coming at them, shriek howling down the tunnel.

This one kept its wings to its sides and barrelled through with its head down like a battering ram. Dom saw Brian knocked away on the other side, and grabbed the edge of the shrike’s wing as it went past him. The shrike dragged him on along the tunnel, sparks flying from the shield as it scraped along the wall on his other side, rock dust billowing up. Dom managed to get a foothold on the wall and shoved himself up onto the shrike’s back. He’d lost his sword somewhere back down the tunnel, but he grabbed his utility knife and threw himself flat and started stabbing in along the spinal column, as deep as he could reach. The shrike’s wings started beating wildly, bashing against the walls: rocks and dirt came raining down, but then he hit something and its legs collapsed out from under it. It gave one last horrible scream and fell still.

Dom rolled off the back just in time, little shrikes already leaping. “Brian!” he shouted, desperate, into the dark.

“Here!” Brian yelled back, somewhere on the other side of the dead shrike, _shit_. Dom scrambled out in front of the shrike, put his shield against its beak, and started shoving as hard as he could, pushing the whole thing back down the tunnel. One of the little shrikes tried to bite him, just because he was there, but he grabbed it with his bare hand and threw it onto the corpse, and it was happy enough to keep tearing at the dead meat instead.

“Can you raise it off the ground a little?” Brian called from up ahead. Dom got the shield wedged underneath the shrike’s chest and levered up, and Brian rolled himself along the floor and scrambled up panting, with Dom’s sword in his arms along with his own. He’d taken some scratches from the little ones going after the body, and there was a patch ripped out of his shirt on one arm: a bitemark marked on the skin, two perfect nested Vs of dots, but he must’ve gotten the shrike before it had finished digging in.

“Okay, let’s get this thing further along,” Dom said, and he went back to pushing while Brian kept the little ones off him. Close to the mouth, the body stuck against a few rocks. Dom stopped shoving and Brian started cutting holes in the body. They slid the long bones they’d collected through the body, wedging the ends into the ground and the walls.

Finally they fell back and sank to the floor of the tunnel. Brian reached up and hauled the ripcord for the next chemlight: the violet light was fading again. “The _size_ of that thing,” he said, gulping water.

“Yeah,” Dom said. The skull was already almost picked clean, looked about the full length of his arm.

The big ones had got hold of the body and were trying to yank it out again. The bones held it back: they were bending, so the whole thing would give eventually, but it was going to take them some more time at least. The little ones were having a ball in the meantime, feasting; Dom even saw a couple of them stop eating when they were pushed out of the way and fly out of the tunnel without putting up a fight, gorged full.

“Wow,” Brian said; he’d seen it too. “How many _do_ you think it would take, to gorge that whole swarm?”

“Three in ten’s the rule,” Dom said. “You think we’re gonna kill three hundred shrikes?”

Brian grinned over at him, teeth pale purple in the weird light. “I’ll take half if you take half.”

Dom snorted. “I thought you said you got better?”

“Well,” Brian said. “Depends on who you ask.” He held out another fruit bar.

Dom broke off a chunk of it. “Figure we can hold out another hour?” he asked around chewing.

“With a few more naps like this?” Brian said. “I’ll keep going, man.”

“We shouldn’t push it to the limit,” Dom said. “No sense taking a stupid risk.”

Brian looked at him pointedly, not even saying it. Dom gave his shoulder a shove. Brian laughed a little, but he said, “Look, man, I don’t want to feed these fucking things a horse, any horse. If we have to, we have to, but I’m good to go for now. Save it as long as we can.”

“All right,” Dom said, quietly, swallowing down _thank you_ ; Brian didn’t have to give a shit about his wagon horses, or the people back behind that iron door; he had every right to say he needed a rest, to switch off.

They sat in the dark listening to the shrilling: it was getting even louder outside, probably the big ones angry that they couldn’t get their meal. Their shoulders were pressed up against each other, Brian’s side warm against his; Dom could feel him breathing steadily, see the light glinting off his swords.

 “So you’ve been a clan leader since you were fifteen?” Brian said.

Dom shrugged. “Fancy name for looking after my family.”

“It’s got to still be pretty rough out there, without a stakehold,” Brian said. “You guys follow the clean rain?”

“Out to the fruit country, and in to the Plains,” Dom said. “We pick up a string of wild horses on the way back out each year, sell them in Landmark for supplies. We get by okay.” He looked over. “Were you born in the Valley?”

“Yeah.” Brian was quiet. “My mom couldn’t have another kid, after me,” he said finally, abrupt. “She never said, but growing up, I always knew she’d wanted a daughter. Someone who could step into her place, when she was gone. And I couldn’t be that. So—”

“You tried to be everything else instead,” Dom said.

“Something like that,” Brian said. “I wanted to prove to her I could take care of everything she’d built. Of her people.”

Dom nodded. Once in a while, when something went really well, he had a dream about his dad. He didn’t get to save him, in the dream: his dad was always still dying, down in the dust outside the gates of Fort Verde. But Dom got to ride to his side and kneel down next to him; he had time to say, “I’ve got it. I’ve got them,” and his dad smiled at him before he died and Dom woke up. That was the best dream about his father he ever had.

“Shit!” Brian yelped suddenly, grabbing the shield and pulling it up in front of their faces: the two halves of the snapped bone whacked into it with a clang, and the corpse was finally getting hauled out, shrieks rising outside even louder than before as the big ones saw that the bones had already been picked almost clean. The little shrikes didn’t even come back in right away: there were shrill cries outside, and then another big head came thrusting into the tunnel.

#

Time kept moving in shades of violet, the chemlights fading away and coming up bright again when they pulled the next ripcord. Dom had lost count how many they’d used: at least four or five, he was pretty sure. They had to be halfway through the night, and Cab was still alive and well back behind the iron door. He and Brian weren’t talking much anymore even between waves, saving every ounce of energy.

The floor of the tunnel was muddy with shrike blood, a thin metallic stink rising. They’d killed another three big ones, who even knew how many little ones. Bottling up the bodies was working: lots more of the little ones were gorging out and leaving, even some of the middle-sized ones. It made the waves between a little easier.

The big ones were fighting outside, shrieking at each other higher pitched and really getting mad: a whole feast going on inside the tunnel that they couldn’t get at, even if it was their own flesh and blood, and all of a sudden the rock wall shook. One of them had just slammed against the tunnel mouth outside. More shrieking, more thumps: dust rained down from the roof, and then suddenly the biggest fucking shrike Dom had ever heard of shoved its head into the tunnel. It was too big for even its shoulders to fit, but it was snapping and shrieking and thrashing at the rock walls with its beak, and wing-claws as wide as Dom’s goddamn broadsword were tearing away at the edges too. It got its beak into a roof beam and tore the whole thing away, and with a roar a chunk of the roof caved in over its head.

Dom stumbled back down the tunnel coughing and blind with dust, Brian’s hand gripped in his the only landmark. The shrike ripped its head out of the collapsed rock with a furious cry and came scrabbling back in, clawing away the heaps of rock and dirt and digging open the collapsed tunnel mouth, getting ready to try again.

“That thing is going to pull the whole fucking mountain down on us!” Brian shouted, wiping dust off his face.

“What the fuck do you want to do about it?” Dom yelled back, and then they both stared at each other, because there was only one thing they _could_ do: either they backed away down the tunnel until the shrike pulled down so much of it that the rock above came down and crushed them all, or—

“ _Fuck_ ,” Dom said, and dumped his shield, because what was the point: that thing could have swallowed it whole. At least there weren’t any little shrikes in the tunnel at the moment: none of them could even get in around the giant one’s head.

“This is the single most stupid thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Brian said, almost cheerfully, and then they ran straight at the shrike, at the savage snapping beak.

At least the shrike was blind with its own dust, but the beak whipped towards Dom as he got close, scenting. He stopped and had to jump back out of range, but Brian took the opening and lunged past on the other side and got underneath it. The shrike ducked its head forward in on itself, following him, and suddenly Dom was staring into a dinner-plate sized eye, reflecting purple and green light back at him. He swung and slashed the whole thing open in a single stroke from side to side, a gush of fluid running out, and the shrike gave a howling like the gates of hell opening and smashed him against the wall with its entire head.

The dark of the tunnel exploded into lights inside his skull. The impact drove the air out of his lungs, blood trickling down his back as he slid down the wall, coughing. The shrike was twisting its head trying to grab him with its beak. A hand grabbed at his ankles and dragged him forward, pulling him underneath the shrike’s body.

He and Brian were flattened against the floor of the tunnel. Blood was drizzling down on them. Brian had lost his long sword: he was just hacking through the shrike’s feathers desperately with his short blade in one hand and a utility in the other, trying to get at _something_. Dom pulled out his own knife and started in, too: they both grabbed onto the shrike’s body as it tried to push further into the tunnel, carrying them with it. It shrieked again, the whole body thrumming with it.

“The wing!” Dom shouted at Brian, thinking about where the artery was on a horse, and Brian nodded and started thrusting his short blade in as far as it could go towards the back joint of the shoulder. The shrike was twisting in the tunnel like a cork in the neck of a bottle, wedging itself further in, and then suddenly it gave up: it started squirming to get itself back out, and holy shit it was going to pull them _outside_ —

If they let go, the shrike would get them with its beak on the way out: if they held on, they were going to be dumped out in the open, in the middle of the swarm. Brian shot Dom a look and Dom shook his head and grimly held on: he’d take a shot with a swarm going into a frenzy over the big wounded shrike instead of making himself a sitting target for that beak. He kept stabbing, they both kept stabbing, desperately, and suddenly one of them hit something: a gush of blood spurted out so fast and hard it hit Brian in the face and knocked him loose when he threw up his other hand to ward it off, by instinct.

Dom let go and grabbed him in his arms, rolled them both away as the shrike’s beak came down towards them, gouging a chunk out of the rock. Then Brian was scrambling up and dragging Dom to his feet and they ran for it, until they got another ten meters down the tunnel and realized everything had gone quiet all of a sudden, a quiet that left a ringing in Dom’s ears.

They crept back along the tunnel, nothing in their hands anymore; Dom bent down and picked up one of the bones when they got past it, and Brian pulled out a folding pocketknife, the kind of thing you’d use to pry a stone out of a horse’s hoof. A few more meters along, Dom found the shield, and a little way on Brian picked up his knife.

The monster shrike was lying stuck in the mouth of the tunnel, plugging it all the way up. Its one eye was dark and staring emptily. Its body was jerking and twitching, like the shrikes on the outside were feasting on it. They stared at it. The broadsword was down in the rocks just short of its beak, and when Brian pulled the next chemlight, he spotted his longsword on the ground, a big notch taken out of the blade near the top.

They got the weapons back and then they just sat down on the rocks near the head. It felt strange to be in the quiet after all the endless shrilling noise. “Let me get a look at your back,” Brian said after a moment, and dug out the little first aid kit they’d buried under the rocks halfway down the tunnel. Dom just took off what was left of his shirt. Brian rinsed off the scrapes with some of his water and swiped them with an alcohol wipe, taped on some gauze. “Doesn’t look too bad,” he said.

He sat down again. Neither of them moved much. “Hey,” Dom said after a moment. “What did that mean, what you said to Mia? That she was Willow Tree.”

“Oh.” Brian huffed a little laugh. “It’s, uh. It’s a bedtime story my mom used to tell me when I was a kid. Willow Tree and her brother Black Horse go all over the place having adventures, exploring dead cities, that kind of thing. Every story always ended where they find Green River and they decide to stay with him, because it’s a good place for Willow Tree to plant herself. And then she spreads her branches, and Black Horse and Green River are cooled down by her shade, and Green River brings them water and Black Horse paws up the ground, and pretty soon there are a whole lot of willow trees growing along the bank.”

“Yeah, your mom didn’t have a message going there or anything,” Dom said, and both of them were laughing, as much as they had energy to manage.

“Yeah, well,” Brian said. “It didn’t really work on me, I always wanted the part where they tricked the cycle gang or outran the stampede.” Then he grinned at Dom. “But I guess some of it stuck.”

The shrike’s body shuddered again, and it got dragged out of the mouth of the tunnel. Dom heaved himself to his feet with an effort, but the next wave didn’t come right away: a few little shrikes darted in, but they went for the big puddle of blood where the big shrike had been lying, gulping it up with their beaks and chirping to each other, not even shrilling. There was a lot of thumping and clattering of rocks going on outside, sounded like the big shrikes were busy pulling apart the huge one.

Dom sat down again to wait. Brian had never stood up, he’d just skewered one little shrike that came too close, and tossed it down the tunnel. It just sat there dead: the other small ones didn’t even go for it.

Their chemlight was fading weirdly fast. “Something wrong with that one?” Dom said, squinting at the purple light.

“No,” Brian said slowly. “No, the sun’s coming up.”

Dom turned to stare out the tunnel mouth. It was a pale ragged hole looking out on rocks starting to be grey in the early dawn. “Huh,” he said blankly. They sat and watched it getting lighter and lighter.

“Holy fucking _shit_ ,” Vince said, and Dom jerked around: Vince was standing behind them, shield on his arm and club in his hand, staring at the tunnel mouth.

“What the hell are you doing, why did you open the door?” Dom said.

“What do you think?” Vince said. “It got quiet. We thought they killed you and ate you and _left_. Why the fuck didn’t you come and switch off?”

“Well, I guess you can have a turn now if you want,” Brian said after a moment, like he was being generous, and Dom started laughing, deep in his gut because he was too tired to get it up any higher, and let his head tip back against the wall.

Letty and Leon came out, too. They all waited together until the chemlight on the wall really did start to go out. The shrikes still hadn’t come back at them, not except a few small ones that Vince bashed one at a time, and finally Letty said, “Fuck it, I’m going to go look.”

Dom groaned and made himself stand up. He held a hand out to Brian, and Brian let himself get hauled up, too. They edged up to the tunnel mouth and stopped.

Smashed rock and dirt had rolled away in a couple of long piles from the mountainside. In a wide half-circle around the tunnel mouth, maybe twenty meters across, the ground was covered with shrike bones, picked clean as empty plates. The monstrous skull of the last big shrike sat in the middle like a trophy on the top. Its backbone was even still mostly attached, snaking away from it. Around the outer edge of the ring, the rest of the shrikes were lying in still, black-feathered heaps, little ones on top of big ones, all of them gorged and sleeping.

“Holy shit,” Leon whispered.

Then Letty said sharply, “What’s _that_?”

Dom followed her pointing finger: there was a dust cloud coming fast, from the north, and then Brian started laughing and said, “It’s the fucking cavalry.” In fifteen minutes the posse was pulling up, the horses slowing as the riders got close enough to see the shrikes everywhere.

“Hey, Roman,” Brian called. “Just in time for the cleanup.” He waved a hand at the shrikes. “They went down less than an hour ago.”

The guy in the lead was staring around at the shrikes, a tall black guy on a big yellow palomino that looked almost as fast as it was flashy. He looked at Brian with an outraged expression. “O’Conner, you goddamn asshole, you telling me you killed all these shrikes?”

Brian held out a hand, beckoning, and Roman tossed him a canteen; he tipped it back, drinking. “Well, Dom here helped me out a little,” he said, between gulps.  

“Fuck you,” Dom said amiably, letting the dented shield slide off his arm: there wasn’t going to be any fighting this crowd, but anyway he was getting the idea maybe he wouldn’t have to. “ _O’Conner_ , huh?”

“Yeah, I thought maybe I wouldn’t mention that right away, just in case you got any bright ideas about ransom,” Brian said, grinning and passing him the canteen. “Also, you realize what this means.”

“What’s that?” Dom said, tipping his head back. It was a good canteen, thick-walled, and the water was sweet and cold.

“I won the bet,” Brian said, grinning even wider. 

“Like hell you did,” Dom said, wiping his mouth. “The sun’s been up for half an hour.”

“We said the next morning!” Brian said.

“ _By_ next morning,” Dom said firmly. “But I’m willing to call it a tie,” and Brian laughed out loud, tossed his sword aside, and caught Dom’s head in his hands and kissed him.

“I swear on every rock in the canyon, only you, O’Conner,” Roman was muttering over their heads, and Dom had never given a thought to kissing a guy before, but fuck it. He put his arm around Brian’s waist and kissed the breath right back out of him, good as he was getting, sweet and cool and wet.

# End

 

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback loved! If you like, [reblog](http://astolat.tumblr.com/post/127332498378/ok-so-as-i-mentioned-before-this-is-not-actually)!


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